Sessions at OSCON 2012 about Community

Tuesday 17th July 2012

Before we had Internet-sized bandwidth on which to collaborate around software, traditional software business was a simple pipeline. R&D delivered product into the pipe. Marketing delivered messages. Sales and marketing managed and qualified leads through the pipeline and if the product solved a customer problem properly, a market was made and you could measure the profits.

With the rise of the Internet collaborative development communities formed around FOSS licenses. Many have tried to create businesses around such communities, or conversely create their own communities as an adjunct to their business. But in the ensuing confusion of customers and community no one is ever happy.

This talk offers insight into how to think about both groups differently to everyone’s benefit.

Wednesday 18th July 2012

An open source community depends on its capacity to attract people and the efficiency with which it can harness their energy to create great software. While a compelling mission or killer product can be helpful, effective communities must be responsive and efficient in managing the diverse needs and demands of its members.

We have had a history of taking a different approach that has been highly successful in turning small emails and twitter comments into people programming with us on our OSS projects. In this session we will share our stories so that you can also the harness good intentions of others and turn those intentions into committable code.

In your open source project's community, some people contribute. Most people don't. By analyzing the typical open source project's on-ramp for new contributors through the lens of user experience design, we provide practical tips to make any project more approachable and that diversify the community.

What do data analytics and negotiation theory have in common? In this talk, community management adviser David Eaves will outline how these two disciplines form the core of a new Science of Community Management: an approach to measure and manage contributors to make participation less frustration and more productive.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of building Health IT platforms instead of out-of-the box systems? How can people building these systems share tools and resources with others in different countries who may do very different work? This panel of participants in the OpenMRS community will share their real-world experiences from multiple continents on a variety of scales.

“The single biggest pool of untapped natural resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action.” – Cindy Gallop.

Unfortunately many people’s good intentions to help to improve your OSS project don’t result in any action because there are many hurdles to them making a meaningful contribution. The list below shows what we have seen to be the steps that potential contributors often go through. Most well-intentioned potential contributors just don’t seem make it to the end of this list.

Wish – I wish this OSS did x, y or z.
Explore – Let’s see what how this code actually works.
Hack – If I change this, this feature should work.
Share – This Patch adds my new feature.
Acceptance – My patch was accepted!
Insight – Because of my patch, they started doing feature a, b or c.
This talk will be a collection of real-world stories of how we have lowered the bar for contributors to our OSS projects. As a result, we’ve collaborated from programmers from the US, Europe, Africa, India and Australia. Our talk will include stories about our successes in side-stepping the typically longer process. It will also cover an examination of the specific hurdles and an explanation of the techniques and practices we have used to harness the good intentions of others.

Specifically, we will share real world stories from our own OSS projects (ApprovalTests and TeachingKidsProgramming) where specific problems or needs were addressed and improved or fixed due to contributions of other programmers. We will talk about techniques to make working with contributors world-wide possible. These will include specifics about remote pair programming, use of other OSS tools, and setting up environments, creating videos and other artifacts. Also we will share information about the human side of harnessing volunteer goodwill, including lessons we learned about response time, work time, cultural differences and more.

If you have your own OSS project you will learn the following:

How to monitor social media for interest in your project
How and when to reach out and connect to interested technical people
How to do remote pair programming (5 different methods)
How to coordinate a remote, distributed all volunteer team
How to have happy volunteers
How to improve your project, i.e. learn from your volunteers
If you contribute to OSS projects, you will learn the following:

How to get patches approved
How to work with the OSS leads to get your feature ideas coded and checked in
How to turn your own wishful thinking (for an OSS project to add features) into reality
The open source community has grown strong and productive by harnessing the goodwill around the globe. We would like to turn even more of that goodwill into code.

Thursday 19th July 2012

What is the single most valuable part of an open source project? Its brand. When everyone can fork your code on their own, a project's brand is the most important thing to understand and maintain for the benefit of the project's core technical community. Learn how communities can intelligently manage their reputation, and companies can respectfully use the brand.

Friday 20th July 2012

Formed by a group that included Tim O'Reilly, OSI has been the cornerstone of the movement OSCON aims to gather in plenary. Hear how OSI is transforming itself into the new voice of the global open source community

The strength of your community is the best predictor of your project's long-term viability. What happens when that community is gradually infiltrated by assholes, who infect everyone else with their constant negativity and personal attacks? This talk will teach you about the dramatic impact assholes are having on your organization today and will show you how you can begin to repair it.

MediaGoblin is a decentralized, extensible, and forward-looking free software media hosting system (and includes cool features like HTML5 video hosting). Hear about the state of the project, why decentralized media hosting matters, lessons learned from organizing the community, and why this is an important direction for the GNU project and free and open source software to head.

Grow, Grow, Grow! People are the life-blood of Open Source Communities. Mozilla has always recognised this in regards to their own success, and are now undertaking a project to expand the community even further with the Mozilla Reps program. This talk will discuss the successes and challenges we have had, and our plans for continued momentum.